We all live in a house on fire, no fire department to call;
no way out, just the upstairs window to look out of
while the fire burns the house down with us trapped,
locked in it.
   —Tennessee Williams, The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore

THE ENGINE made a harsh stutter, a barking choke that caught and held and broke again. When the sound began to roll together into a continuous growl, backfire explosions punctuated the roar. The random rimshots came less frequently as Kev put the Barracuda in gear.

The steering wheel seemed loose in his hands, and the transmission kept slipping, but the car traveled all the way from Matt’s house to the parking lot in back of the A-1 Auto Parts store. When the car shuddered to a halt, Kev took a black baseball cap, a pair of bicycle gloves, and a polo shirt out of the box in the backseat.

Kev was already at the employee’s entrance, the back door, when a bright-blue 1967 Camaro pulled up. He turned and saw a man step out of the car. The man wore dirty jeans, but Kev could see he had money. The watch gave him away. The man leaned over to look at Kev’s car as soon as he’d locked the Camaro. Kev watched him run a hand over the curved air intakes on the hood of the ’Cuda. The metal was curved like the nostrils of some carnivorous animal, straining against the flaking yellow paint. Under the rust and spattered mud, the flanks of the car were curved as well, feral and powerful.

In the parking lot, Kev saw a police car turn tightly, as if circling the building. He scowled and pulled the A-1 polo shirt on over his T-shirt. Time to get to work.

Then the man at his car spoke. He didn’t glance at Kev, he looked at the car like a lover. “Saw you drive up in this—Michael said you do good work. Damn, this ’Cuda is running pretty smooth for a ’68.”

Nervously, Kev saw the police car drift crookedly to the end of the cul-de-sac, coming closer to him every minute, like a fish in the current. “Uh-huh,” he said. “Yeah, I got it running pretty tight.”

The man glanced over at him. “You do all the work on this yourself?”

Behind the Camaro, the police car slid to a halt, the tires giving a sharp squeal as the officer yanked it sideways, blocking the driveway.

Kev grunted and pulled the leather bicycle gloves carefully over his swastika. He slapped the A-1 hat on his head, as if that would protect him.

The man glanced around for a moment, but then he turned back to Kev. “You got the feel for these things? Y’know, I love cars, and I took classes, but I don’t have the damn feel at all. Don’t have the magic touch. I gotta hire someone like you to fix up my babies. Michael said you know what you’re doing.”

“Sure,” said Kev absently. He recognized the police officer, it was one of the same ones who had messed with him at the gas station. The officer grinned as Kev recognized him, gave him a false toothy smile.

“Fuck,” Kev murmured under his breath. “Fuck me.”

“What’s that?” said the man with the Camaro. He glanced back and forth between the officer and Kev.

“Move aside,” said the officer. “Sir, I need to ask you to step aside.”

“Shit,” said Kev. Slowly, he edged toward the door of the A-1 shop.

“Is there a problem here?” said the man. “I can’t do business with you, if—”

But then Kev was making a mad dash for the door, and the officer had a weapon in his fist. “Don’t move! Put your hands up!” yelled the officer. “Get those hands up!”

Kev got the door open. Inside, he could see the light reflecting off the lines of tools, the chrome bumpers hanging from the ceiling, turning in the sudden wind from the door. But he had too much to lose now. So he held the door there longer than he should have. And then the officer was snapping a cuff onto his wrist.

Kev found out there was a protocol for an interview with him. The handcuffs went on his wrists and his ankles. The cuffs were connected together by a chain around his waist. At the waist was the black metal box. After all this, they let him hobble two doors down the corridor to a gray room.

“Now, Kevin—I believe you like to be called Kev, am I right?” She was wearing a purple dress. She didn’t look like she worked for the cops. Her blouse was like a flower.

“Macht. It means power in German. Kev Macht.”

“All right. Mr. Macht. My name is Nancy Ferreday. We’ve met before, a long time ago. You’ve been in and out of the county justice system since you were twelve years old.”

“Uh-huh.”

Nancy looked down at the papers in front of her. Her brow wrinkled. “I must tell you that I’m concerned. This is your first adult incarceration. Your first adult offense. And they’re charging you with homicide one. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“You’re saying juvie was for kids. We ain’t in Kansas anymore.”

“You might say that.” She took off her glasses and looked at him. “You’re charged with an offense that will change your life forever. The outcome of the case might end it.”

Kev grunted.

She tried to catch his eye again, but Kev wasn’t looking at her any longer. “I’ve been assigned to your case because I have a history with you. The questions I have—”

“You got questions?” said Kev loudly. “I got questions!”

Nancy looked at him. Her eyes squinted as if she did not understand. “Well, I’ve got your file here, Mr. Macht. We can discuss our questions. Shall we?” She leafed through loose pages. He recognized a lot of the pages. He’d seen these forms before, in juvie.

“In here is everything about you. Your teen years, when you came in and out of juvenile hall here quite regularly. And your minimal employment history, your time at the compound, that Aryan march you went on. There’s even some childhood pictures.

“See?” she said brightly, and she held up a yellowed page with a photograph on it. He looked past her, around her. The door on the other end of the room had a metal plate wrapped around the doorframe. On this side, there were rivets that held it tight to the door.

She put the picture back in the folder. He watched her shuffle through the pile again. Her hair was short, but tendrils curled along her brow. The hair made him think of pretty girls. She was not pretty anymore. Her brow wrinkled as she bent over the papers.

“Now that last one is from when you were eight years old,” she said. “From school. The next one is from twelve. It’s your school picture.” She held another piece of paper up.

He did not meet her eyes. The door held his interest. Once that door had been an everyday door, before they brought it in here. The metal plate looked like a recent addition. On the other side of it there must be a knob, or a keyhole—the way in and out.

She waved the paper in the air. “You aren’t even looking at the pictures here.”

“I know what I looked like.”

“But this is when you won a scholarship to summer camp,” she said. “You look—”

“Fuck,” said Kev tonelessly. “Don’t tell me. I looked all happy then, is that it? I was a dumb kid. I didn’t know any better. You gonna keep showing me pictures all day?”

She closed the folder softly, like she had planned it, expected him to yell at her. “No,” she said. “I’m not. I just thought we could talk about why you’re here.” Her eyes were green, and around the lower edges were black streaks, as if her mascara had run.

He looked away from her face. Each of the rivets on the door were scraped until they were bright against the metal, as if someone had rubbed them raw, tried to bite them.

“Why do you think you’re here, Kev?”

Kev looked down from the top of the door to her face. Her eyes were wide as she waited. He opened his mouth and heard his own voice, unnaturally loud in the small room.

“You’re gonna help me, that what you think? I’m prob’ly here because the ideas I got were bad shit! I tried to get rid of Hitler in my mind, Adolf Eichmann, flush that shit. But I guess it was too late, huh? It’s a free country, man. But I’m not free.”

Kev did not wait for the wide expression of her eyes to narrow, as he knew it would. Instead, he looked down at the floor. It was the color of a blackened fireplace pit, the paint wearing off. There was not a single crack in the floor wide enough for a knife.

Nancy Ferreday picked up an envelope and took out a stack of photographs. She glanced up at him, and the stack fell over, scattering across the table. Nervously, she plucked one off the top, put it down in front of him.

“No, that’s not why you’re here,” said Nancy Ferreday. Her voice was harder now. “You’re here because they think you killed this man.”

“Killed him?” said Kev. He glanced down and was surprised by the face. The suit on the bus, the man with the cross. “I met this guy! Father Arlen, right? How did he die?”

“Well, I’m here to figure out whether or not you know you killed this man. There’s a chance that you might be able to get psychological help. There’s an insanity defense—”

“What—now I’m mental? What do you mean, I don’t know what I did?”

But her reply was inaudible to him, her voice washed over, unheard. The spilled photographs were mesmerizing, the mysteries of bone and muscle revealed.

“That’s what I did?” said Kev in a vacant voice. “You think I did this?”

“The prosecutor’s office sure thinks you did it,” said Nancy Ferreday. Her hands were splayed out over the photos, trying to put them back together.

As she moved them, he abruptly recognized a head that was not connected to anything else. A quavering sensation vibrated up through him. He turned his head and retched. A clear fluid came out of his mouth and splashed on the floor and the table.

He tried to wipe his chin, and found he could not. Nancy Ferreday reached over with a tissue and touched his mouth. “You think I did this?” he said again. His lips trembled against the tissue.

The kid didn’t look at Matt. Instead, he stared directly at the wall of his cell. Concrete block construction, two layers of new green paint. The entire surface was covered with scrawls, absurd field notes scratched on the walls as inmates came down off of meth or speed, a frenetic spattering of words.

“I didn’t do anything,” Kev said tonelessly. He stared at the indecipherable wall, as if it held a message only he could understand.

“What didn’t you do, Kev?” Matt was as close to the bars of the two-man cell as he was allowed to go, but he still had to speak loudly, if he wanted the kid to hear him.

Kev glanced at him dully. “You read those letters yet? Those ones I found?”

“No,” said Matt shortly. “We aren’t here to talk about me.”

“Jesus, dude—that chick really liked you! You should read ’em, you should—”

“Yeah, that’s the last thing I need. She liked me, I killed her anyway. Jesus, shut up, Kev. I’m not here about that. I’m here because you’ve been arrested.”

“I didn’t do anything,” repeated the kid. “I didn’t rip anything off, didn’t kill—”

“Okay, but do you have a lawyer yet, Kev? Has one been provided for you? Can I call your mom for you? Or your stepdad?”

“Nah.” Kev glanced up as the man in the upper bunk rolled over in his sleep. “Everyone is away for the winter. Or Majorca, somewhere like that. Won’t do any good.”

Matt wrote down a note. “Every little bit helps,” he said. “Now I’m going to tell you about the case. I need to know how much is factual. If any of it can be challenged.”

Kev stared at him. “How come we ain’t in the gray room with me chained up?”

Matt glanced uncertainly down the hallway. “Because I’m not on the record here with you, Kev. The trustee owes me a favor—he got me in to talk to you without logging the visit, you got it? I wasn’t here. Be nice to that trustee, okay? Don’t give him shit.”

Kev nodded, something dead in his look.

“So.” Matt looked down at his notebook. “They say you were at the Greyhound station on August 27. They are going to claim that you were the last person he was seen with. It looks bad that you have that cross. So if anyone can provide you with an alibi at the time, I should talk to them. Do you understand?”

The man on the top bunk muttered. But the kid didn’t pay attention to him, or to Matt. The words didn’t seem to affect Kev, they were like a meaningless wash of sound.

“Fifth amendment, right? Don’t say anything, they can’t get you. That’s what he says.” Kev jerked his thumb toward the upper bunk. The man up there was awake now, leaning against the wall. Fresh bruises on his face. Probably caught in a barroom brawl. He was reading a magazine.

“Jailhouse lawyers aren’t going to help.” Matt lowered his voice even though the man had not seemed to notice Kev’s comment. “In two weeks, they’re transferring you to Boise. You’ve got to have a better story about what you did with Arlen by then. If you’re going to convince them that you didn’t kill him.”

“I didn’t kill anyone!” Kev’s eyes were liquid with fear. “I just talked to him. I rode beside him the whole way, told him I’d do him a favor by giving his girl the cross—and now he ends up dead, and they’re telling everyone I took him out?”

“So why didn’t you pass on the cross to her? Why did you—”

“I didn’t know where she was!” Kev’s eyes were flowing freely, his cheeks covered in a wash of tears. “I meant to do the right thing, but I just—”

“So you didn’t take the cross from him—he gave it to you, of his own free will?”

Kev nodded furiously and rubbed his face against his shoulder. When he looked up again, his eyes were red and raw. “Yeah, and all he talked about was some story some other guy had told him. Some guy who was in the hospital. Someone from a long time ago had come back, freaked this guy out so bad he had a heart attack, keeled over—and he decided to talk to Arlen, in the hospital afterward. Like, he confessed or something.”

“So where was Arlen going? What was he doing with the story he heard?”

“Well, his little girl got taken away from him. Arlen was sure it was connected to this guy. He thought if he talked to him, explained it all, it would be all right.” Then he added, as if to explain something to himself. “You know, Arlen was like, a minister?”

“So was Arlen going to talk to someone else? Was he going to the police with it?”

“Nah, he was just tryin’ to get his little girl back.” Kev rubbed a tearstain off the side of his face, the swastika moving up and down like a tiny spider against his skin.

“Arlen said he had a trump card—something he thought was important.”

“What was that?”

Kev waved a hand and then slapped it down against the bars in frustration. “I dunno what it was. But Arlen told someone about it before he died.”

“Who?”

“Some guy in Wallace.” Kev rubbed a hand over his scalp. “The night before his little girl was taken. He kept going on about his friend Leo, or whatever his name was. I dunno, maybe his name was Leonard.”

“In Wallace?” Matt mused aloud and made a note. “Was this someone he—”

“Dammit, I don’t know anything else.” Kev locked his arms on the bars. “I just—”

“Okay, one last thing,” said Matt. “What did you do at the station when—”

“Jesus Christ, I didn’t do anything!” Kev exploded, his fists pounding against the bars. “I don’t know who that other guy in the station was—I don’t know why he drove away with Arlen’s little rugrat—hell, I don’t know a damn thing!

“Jesus, Matt, I’m getting screwed here, and you’re just helping them screw me! You don’t want to know the truth about anything. Go to fuckin’ hell!”

DECEMBER 1988

THE GIRL pushed her face against the glass, leaving wet spots where her hair and her mouth touched it. She had taken a bath, and her hair was still damp. She stood on the cushions in her good shoes and pressed her face to the big picture window behind the couch, watching the road. She could feel the glass against her teeth.

She stood on the couch only after her grandmother had driven away. Her grandmother had rules she carried around inside of her, she found one whenever she saw a situation that fit a rule. And the girl knew other people had rules inside of them too. Her mother did not. By this time, it seemed her mother only cared about one rule—no one was supposed to talk about the girl’s daddy.

For the girl, rules had colors in her mind. There were red ones that people talked about a lot, and green-blue ones that permitted no talking, and every color in between. Once—the only time she could remember her mother talking about her daddy—the very air itself seemed to change, the room tinged with a sudden change in shade.

One of the rules was being clean. That was why she had a bath. Even though she had refused to wash her hair, the bath made her clean. One more rule was to dress for company. And another was not to stand on the couch.

But the woman who was going to talk to her was not here yet. The rules did not matter until she came to the door. After that, every rule mattered, even the ones that had not been told to her yet.

Secrets did not have colors, and for that reason they were more dangerous. No one could see them. The girl had secrets. He had laid a secret on her in the car, after he rescued her. So now she had to keep the secrets invisible, so no one would see them ever.

When she heard the car in the driveway, she sat and smoothed her dress with her hands, so that the wrinkles disappeared. All that was left was the image of her mouth on the glass. Anxiously, she watched the wet spot as the condensation faded away.

The girl liked the woman’s dress, and her name. It was an old-fashioned name, one from a book: Nancy. And on this visit, Nancy even brought her a Christmas present.

Yet every time Nancy came, she lied. She always said she was there to talk to her. But the girl knew different by now. Nancy was there because she wanted her to talk.

So there was no one she could trust, except her mother, who did not count.

It took most of the evening for Nancy to discover what the girl had known from the beginning of the visits: she could not tell Nancy anything.

Instead, the girl closed her eyes and remembered the sweet smoke drifting around the car, the way his lips moved around the hand-rolled cigarette, the quick glance he gave her as he opened her car door, held his finger up to his lips, smiling at her, keeping their secret.

She opened her eyes again, and everything she’d seen seemed as smoky as a dream. Maybe he didn’t exist at all. Maybe it was just her own idea. Maybe she should never have smiled back at him. Maybe it was her fault.

The air in the room became charged with something chill and icy, an underwater blue. She breathed out as fast as she could, and then she kept her mouth tightly closed, not wanting that color inside of her.

Finally, her mother said that she could go to her room.

But the girl didn’t. She pretended to go to her room, but she went behind the couch, where she could listen. This time, Nancy’s tone did not change when she thought the girl was gone. That made the girl wonder if she’d been wrong not to trust her.

Then, when her mother asked about how daddy died, Nancy said she did not know anything, which seemed to the girl to be more honest than anything her grandmother said. She began to like Nancy for the first time. But by the time she felt she could trust Nancy, it was too late. Nancy was gone again.

Her mother seemed sad after Nancy left, but then that was not unusual. The rule about standing on the couch seemed to have left the house along with Nancy. After they had gone, the girl took the cushions from the couch and threw them on the floor. She took her shoes off so that she could jump on the couch.

She danced on the cushions until her grandmother arrived back at home.